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Read Cindi’s latest column about Nikki’s “whoppers”

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Since I griped about the lede headline in The State today (and I wasn’t picking on John there, it was just the headline that got me), I want to direct you, with my warm approval, to Cindi Scoppe’s latest today.

The subject: Nikki Haley’s habit of misleading, and just generally saying stuff that isn’t true. After taking Vincent Sheheen to task for HIS misleading question, “When will she release her tax returns?,” when she sorta kinda had, Cindi went on to demonstrate how such misstatements are a regular thing with his opponent.

I’ll excerpt here the last few grafs of the column:

The day after her WLTX interview, Ms. Haley appeared on Greta Van Sustern’s cable talk show and stepped up her usual attack on Mr. Sheheen for “making $400,000 as a trial lawyer” by calling him “a trial lawyer that makes $400,000 a year off the state.”

It’s pretty audacious, in a state with a median household income of $42,000, for someone who made $196,282 last year to castigate someone else for making $372,509. But the more serious sin here is the total fabrication about where Mr. Sheheen’s money came from.

Contrary to what you’d think if you listened to the Republicans’ drumbeat for Mr. Sheheen to reveal the sources of his income, legislators already have to report all the money they receive from state and local governments. In addition, attorneys must report the money they receive representing clients before the Workers Compensation Commission and other state boards.

As our news department noted on Sunday, last year Mr. Sheheen reported receiving $29,000 in salary and expenses as a senator, and his law firm received $13,000 from the Kershaw County Medical Center, $4,700 from the Cassatt Water Co. and $2,400 from the S.C. Guardian Ad Litem Program. That’s a total of $49,100 “off the state.” I suppose it’s possible that he made money that he didn’t report on his economic disclosure statement — you know, like that $40,000 in consulting fees that Ms. Haley didn’t report from a state government contractor who hired her for her “good contacts.” But since there’s no gray area in state law about reporting government income, I seriously doubt it.

Mr. Sheheen also reported that his law firm made about $170,000 in workers comp fees last year. Now, I would like more details about where the rest of his income came from, and I think he probably could provide them without violating legal ethics, say by telling us how much he received in contingency-fee awards, in retainers, in hourly fees. But it’s more than a little misleading for Ms. Haley to demand more transparency from the candidate who has been far, far more transparent than she has about his income as well as his communications on the taxpayers’ computers and e-mail accounts. Unfortunately, that sort of thing is becoming commonplace.

Cindi, by the way, is about the last person in the MSM you’ll ever see mistake feeling for thought. Always has been. Here, she has demonstrated that laudable trait once again.

By the way, you may want to read her previous column, which she links from this one, on the disturbing Jekyll and Hyde quality Mrs. Haley has demonstrated over time.

Posted in 2010 Governor, Character, Elections, Media, Nikki Haley, South Carolina, The State, Words | 3 Responses »

A closer look at Nikki’s idea of fiscal responsibility

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

Turning from Nikki Haley’s foot-dragging on transparency regarding her taxpayer-issued computer and e-mails, let’s take another look at her problems with paying her taxes on time.

This is particularly relevant because of her oft-stated wish that government be run like a business, and her touting of her proven skills as an accountant.

Let’s take a look at Cindi Scoppe’s column Sunday. Cindi, a meticulous reporter if ever I’ve met one, didn’t think much one way or the other about Nikki’s failure to pay her taxes on time until she looked into it further herself. Here’s an excerpt from what she found, going well beyond what had been previously reported:

The problem wasn’t that the Haleys sought and received extensions. It is in fact quite common for people to get a six-month extension to file their tax returns. But as the IRS makes clear, the extension applies only to the return, not to the tax payment itself. Taxes are always due by April 15 — at the latest. The Haleys have not paid their taxes by April 15 in any of the past five years…
Even more significantly, the extension gives people only until Oct. 15 to file. The Haleys filed their 2005 tax returns on July 30, 2007 — eight months after the extended deadline. They filed their 2006 tax returns on July 23, 2008 — also eight months after the extended deadline. Their 2007 returns were filed Nov. 5, 2008, just a few days after the extended deadline. (Their 2004, 2008 and 2009 returns were filed after April 15, but before Oct. 15, so the IRS doesn’t consider them late.)
Now, in my book, anytime you have to pay the government a penalty, you’ve done something wrong, and the Haleys have paid the IRS $4,452 in penalties in the past five years — $2,853 for filing late, and $1,599 for paying late…
Still, the idea that paying your taxes late, and waiting eight months after the extended deadline to file a return, is doing “nothing wrong” is more of a stretch.
But the biggest stretch is the way Ms. Haley has sought to spin her income tax problem into a virtue. She talks about how she and her husband fell upon tough economic times and cut back on their spending and learned to live within their means, which she says demonstrates what a fiscally responsible governor she would be. It seems to me that her actions demonstrate just the opposite.
The Haleys didn’t pay their taxes late once or twice, when things were bad; they paid their taxes late in every one of the past five years — not just in 2006, when their income dropped by half, but also in 2005 when it was going up, and in 2007, 2008 and 2009, when it was going up substantially, topping out at nearly $200,000 last year….
… the fact is that part of her strategy was to avoid paying her bills on time, by essentially giving herself a loan from those of us who paid our taxes on time. A bailout if you will, albeit temporary, for the candidate who deplores federal bailouts. And since she failed to pay her taxes on time five years in a row, it raises questions about her stewardship of money….
I questioned Ms. Haley’s campaign several times to make absolutely sure that the Haleys had not somehow managed to get an additional extension, and her spokesman never attempted to give any sort of justification for their missing the extended deadlines. I’m not sure what the repeated delinquent tax filings suggest: Poor organizational skills? Inability to delegate authority — or, if delegated, to choose trustworthy people to whom to delegate? A disregard for the laws the rest of us have to obey? What I am sure of is that if it were me, I wouldn’t be bragging about it.

Posted in 2010 Governor, Business, Character, Elections, In case you wondered, Media, Money, Nikki Haley, Republicans, South Carolina, Taxes, The State | 32 Responses »

Nikki Haley’s ‘limited hangout’ (This is what she means by ‘transparency,’ when it’s applied to her)

Saturday, August 21st, 2010

First, for you youngsters who’ve only been alive for five minutes or so, here’s a definition of “limited hangout.” Or perhaps we should refer to what Nikki has done as a “modified limited hangout,” the extra-special version invented by Richard Nixon and his droogs.

In any case, this passage from The State’s story today pretty much tells you all you need to know about what Nikki means by the word “transparency” when it is applied to her. To be helpful, I’ve boldfaced the most important parts, in this passage and subsequent ones:

Sheheen released his legislative e-mails, copies of his hard drives and campaign receipts two weeks ago in response to identical open records requests The State sent to both campaigns. Haley released her e-mails, but said she would not release any other documents or allow reporters to review her state-issued computer hard drives. A hard drive keeps a permanent record of e-mails.

Then there’s this little elaboration, which I suppose Nikki put out for the benefit of the technological Neanderthals among the electorate:

“I think 10,000 sheets of paper is a lot,” Haley said, referring to the volume of e-mails in defending the decision not to match Sheheen’s disclosure. “I’m comfortable with how transparent we have been. I’m not going to get into this tit for tat about whether that’s enough sheets of paper.”

Ahem. Nikki, if you’d just go ahead and release the hard drives — you know, the public hard drives that belong to us, the taxpayers whom you allegedly love so much — nobody’s asking for so much as ONE “sheet of paper.” This is the 21st century. Give us the frickin’ hard drives, and we’ll have all that we need. Your good faith will have been demonstrated. Those “sheets of paper” you’re touting are the emblem of your refusal to just go ahead and be transparent, the physical manifestations of your selectivity. And you say there are 10,000 of them. Ten thousand documents attesting to your refusal to simply open up access to a public resource.

Then there’s this:

The Haley campaign emphasized she is exempt from state open records laws as a lawmaker, and all compliance is voluntary.

Wow. Yeah, Nikki, lawmakers ARE exempt, because they write the laws, and refuse to abide by the openness they have statutorily imposed on the rest of government, from the governor to the guy who sweeps up in the offices of our bureaucracy. This is an exemption they carved out for themselves, and themselves alone. This is the very cult of stonewalling that someone we know constantly berates her fellow legislators about. That someone’s initials, in the spirit of limited hangout, are N.H. And I’m not talking New Hampshire.

And you want to hide behind THAT? Really?

Amazing.

Posted in 2010 Governor, Character, Elections, Legislature, Nikki Haley, Republicans, South Carolina, The State | 65 Responses »

Is that the best Haley can do? Bring up Obama? Wow, that is truly lame…

Monday, August 9th, 2010

There wasn’t much new in The State’s recap Sunday of how Vincent Sheheen is pretty much thrashing Nikki Haley on her signature issues (transparency and business savvy) — nothing much you couldn’t have read here the middle of last week.

But I was struck by the unbelievably lame response recorded from the Haley campaign:

For its part, Haley’s campaign has argued Sheheen, a state senator from Camden, is ducking questions about whether the Democrat supports recently approved national health insurance law and the Obama administration’s lawsuit challenging Arizona’s immigration law, two issues Sheheen could have to deal with if elected governor.

Really? That’s the best you can do? He’s totally crushing you on transparency, and making a mockery of your desire to run government the way you run your business, and that’s your response? You retreat to the current GOP playbook? That book only has one play these days, you know. It goes something like this:

When cornered, talk about Obama. Don’t worry that it has nothing to do with the office you’re running for. Just cry, “Obama! Obama! Obama! We hate Obama! Do you hate Obama? If you don’t, you’re not one of us, because we really, really hate him…” Yadda-yadda. Just keep going; don’t worry about repeating yourself or not making the slightest bit of logical sense, because your base will eat this up…

As for the last phrase in that excerpt from The State — “two issues Sheheen could have to deal with if elected governor” — it’s hard to imagine a more transparent case of news people bending over backwards to act like a source is saying something rational when he or she is not. Yeah, you stretch a point and sure, health care reform affects every state (just as it does business and many other aspects of life) and a governor will govern in an environment in which a lot of people insist that immigration is a huge state issue. But you could say that about almost any hot-button national issue, from Afghanistan to the BP oil spill — it still wouldn’t be central. Everyone, but everyone, knows that the Haley campaign putting out that response has absolutely ZERO to do with what faces the next governor, and everything to do with the fact that if it isn’t in the Sarah Palin songbook, they can’t sing it.

Anyway, we are left waiting for a substantive response actually bearing on the two things that are allegedly Nikki’s strong suits, and why we should believe anything she says about them. And Vincent didn’t pick these issues — Nikki did.

Posted in 2010 Governor, Barack Obama, Elections, Health, Immigration, Leadership, Nikki Haley, Parties, Republicans, South Carolina, The State, Vincent Sheheen, Words | 33 Responses »

“Graham’s courageous stand for the republic”

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

After I got done stewing about having screwed up on the Biden thing, I remembered that I owed Cindi Scoppe a phone call. Speaking to her reminded me that I meant to call your attention to The State’s editorial yesterday, “Graham’s courageous stand for the republic.”

It was really, really good. So good that after I read it at breakfast yesterday, I e-mailed Cindi to say:

Excellent lede today. Did you write that, or did I?
It needs to be said loudly and often.

OK, so maybe that wouldn’t be a compliment to you, but I think Cindi saw it as such. You know, knowing my ego as she does.

But it really did say pretty much everything I would have said — of course, one of the great things about working with Cindi over the years was that she could do that. There was a time when I felt like I had to write any important edit about state government or politics to get the message just right, and the right tone and feel into it (to please me, anyway). But I realized shortly after I brought Cindi up from the newsroom that if I just spent a few minutes explaining to her what I wanted, in a few minutes she’d turn it around into an edit that was everything I had wanted, and just as good as if I’d written it — and several hours faster.

The great thing about this was that I didn’t have occasion to tell her what I wanted (you may have heard, I don’t word there any more), and yet I got it anyway. But more important than it being what I wanted, it’s what South Carolina needed to hear about Graham’s decision to vote for Elena Kagan’s nomination, and his cogent explanation of his reasoning.

An excerpt:

THROUGHOUT the first two centuries or so of our nation’s history, what Sen. Lindsay Graham did on Wednesday when he voted to confirm President Obama’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court would have been thoroughly unremarkable. What would have been remarkable would have been for a senator to do otherwise — to vote against confirming a nominee who did not have serious ethical, legal, mental or intellectual problems.

But as Sen. Graham told the Judiciary Committee, things are changing…. What matters today are individual agendas, and punishing anyone who doesn’t agree with their every opinion.

That’s a threat not just to the independence of the judiciary but to the republic itself…

As when he voted to confirm Mr. Obama’s first Supreme Court appointment a year ago, Sen. Graham said Wednesday that Ms. Kagan was not someone he would have appointed, but Mr. Obama won the election; the job of the Senate is merely to stop a president from appointing people who are objectively unfit to be judges.

Will Ms. Kagan join the liberal wing of the court? Probably. Just as President Bush’s appointments joined the conservative wing. We wish there weren’t such clearly defined wings…. But that’s a political preference we have; not a constitutional standard appropriate for senators to consider. As far as confirmation goes, there’s nothing wrong with Ms. Kagan. Just as there was nothing wrong with Sonia Sotomayor. Or with John Roberts. Or with Samuel Alito. And any senator who votes or voted against any of them was simply wrong.

But go read the whole thing. And share it with every South Carolinian you know.

Posted in History, Leadership, Lindsey Graham, Marketplace of ideas, Media, Rule of Law, The State, The World, Working | 15 Responses »

Cindi’s column on Lost Trust, 20 years on

Monday, July 19th, 2010

I missed Cindi Scoppe’s column over the weekend reminiscing about Lost Trust (which broke 20 years ago Sunday) until a reader mentioned Cindi’s “shout-out” to me:

If anything happened in the next year that wasn’t related to the sting, I can’t remember it. While I dissected the ethics proposals, my editor Brad Warthen led the newsroom on a yearlong examination of how the Legislative State produced not only corruption but a hapless government that answered to no one — laying the groundwork for one of the primary focuses of our later work on this editorial board.

Pushed along by Lost Trust, Gov. Carroll Campbell and Brad’s “Power Failure” series, the Legislature voted two years later to hand a third of the government over to the governor. Lawmakers unleashed the powerful State Grand Jury to investigate political corruption cases. They passed a reporter shield law after a judge ordered me and three other reporters held in federal custody for two days for refusing to testify in a corruption trial.

It was interesting to read Cindi’s memory of that from her perspective. I had forgotten a lot of the intrigue that my reporters — particularly Cindi — had to go through to find out what was going on. But then, I was mostly experiencing it second-hand, being the desk man that I was. Cindi and the others would come in with this stuff they had garnered in encounters reminiscent of Bob Woodward’s meetings with Deep Throat in the parking garage, and we’d figure out which outrageous items were worth pursuing to try to confirm immediately and which ones to set aside. And then, how in the world to nail down the relevant ones.

For me, at the epicenter of The State’s coverage, it was a time for keeping a couple of dozen plates spinning, and was a daily challenge to an editor managing finite resources in the midst of stories that seemed to have an infinite number of branches, each one of which was a hot story in itself.

Mind you, Lost Trust wasn’t the only government scandal breaking that summer. We had the final act of the Jim Holderman collapse, a purchasing scandal involving a major agency (I don’t even remember which one now), the head of the Highway Patrol directly personally interfering with the DUI of the head of the local FBI office, and those are just the things that I remember sitting here. There was more. Fortunately, the governmental affairs staff in those days amounted to something (I may have been slightly down from my 1988 high of 10 reporters, but not by much), but there’s only so much that even that many people can do when so much is popping at the same time — and during the time of year when things are usually quiet.

And Lost Trust itself, alone, without those other scandals, would have totally consumed us days, nights and weekends. A full 10 percent of the Legislature indicted? Heady stuff.

We were well out ahead of the competition most days, and I felt proud of my team — Cindi and the others. Then the executive editor, who was new in the job (Gil Thelen), one busy day stopped by my desk to say it was all very well and good that we were staying ahead of the story and beating everybody on it, but what about the future? What, out of all this mess, might we be able to offer readers to give them the sense that something could be done about the dysfunction of SC government? I probably stared at him like he was a lunatic for wanting me to think about anything ELSE on top of the mad juggling I was doing at the moment, but I did think about it. And the result was the Power Failure series. I spent a year on it, supervising reporters from across the newsroom in producing a 17-installment opus that explained just how SC government was designed to fail.

And as Cindi notes, the themes developed at that time resonated through my work, and hers, for my entire 15 years on the editorial board.

Posted in Feedback, Government restructuring, History, Marketplace of ideas, Media, Personal, South Carolina, The State, Working | 24 Responses »

Show us transparency, Nikki: Release the e-mails

Monday, July 12th, 2010

Did you see the strong editorial in The State Sunday, challenging Nikki “Transparency” Haley for hiding behind a loophole in FOI specifically carved out to protect legislators, and legislators alone, from transparency in order to keep her state-issued e-mail secret?

I was very glad to see it. As the edit pointed out, this isn’t about Will Folks or disgusting sex allegations. Neither The State’s editorial board nor I expect to find anything about that if we ever see those e-mails. But the fact that this started with such accusations creates a smoke screen that lets Nikki get away with a flagrant flouting of the principles she lets on to hold most dear. From the heart of the editorial:

Ms. Haley, after all, is not just someone who thinks government transparency is a nice thing. Her one claim to fame as a legislator is her crusade to bring sunlight to a legislative process that for too long has protected lawmakers from accountability rather than giving the voters information they deserve. Her entire campaign for governor is built on that push for openness, for letting the public in on the Legislature’s secrets, for eliminating the special perks and privileges legislators give themselves and their friends.

Does that apply only to the direct expenditure of public money?

Does it apply only to other people?

Imagine if the blogger had claimed that he helped Rep. Haley secretly funnel millions of tax dollars into a green-bean museum and steer tens of millions more in cushy no-bid contracts to her campaign donors, and that messages on her government e-mail account would back up his claim. Is there anyone who would not be demanding that she make the correspondence public?

What is she hiding? Why doesn’t she want us to see the messages she has been sending as she juggled her campaign for governor with doing her job as a legislator?

It is not Ms. Haley’s job to disprove unsubstantiated allegations. It is, however, her job to prove that her commitment to ushering in government transparency and ushering out special legislative privileges is sincere — even more since it has been called into question before. She still hasn’t explained what she did to earn more than $40,000 in consulting fees from a government contractor that hired her for her “good contacts.”

If Ms. Haley were governor, we already would have seen her e-mails, because what governors write on their government e-mail accounts is public record. In fact, Gov. Mark Sanford’s attorney saw fit to turn over some e-mails from his personal account, because she determined that he was using it to discuss public business.

If Ms. Haley were the president of the University of South Carolina, we already would have seen her e-mails. Ditto if she were a $30,000-a-year clerk in the bowels of the bureaucracy, because what nearly all state employees write on their government e-mail accounts is public record.

The only reason her public e-mail correspondence has remained hidden is that she is a legislator, and legislators have written themselves a special exemption to the Freedom of Information Act.

This exemption is the very epitome of the secrecy that Ms. Haley vows to eliminate.

I’m glad to see this now. Because at some point, someone was going to point out this obvious inconsistency and raise a stink about it. My concern has been that it would happen in late October, thereby engendering another tidal wave of protective emotion that would sweep Rep. Haley to victory.

The time to address this is now, when there’s time to be calm. Time to see that she cannot possibly have any legitimate excuse not to share these state-sponsored communications.

What is she hiding, indeed? For all I know, absolutely nothing. But then I don’t know, because she’s hiding it, in a stunning display of contempt for the ideals she says she stands for.

Posted in 2010 Governor, Character, Elections, Leadership, Legislature, Marketplace of ideas, Media, Nikki Haley, Republicans, South Carolina, The State | 22 Responses »

Blast from the newspaper past

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

Bob Ford shared this old newspaper page with me over the weekend. How old? So old that it’s from before I even worked at any newspaper, much less The State. My career starting in 1974 as a copy boy at The Commercial Appeal. But this is from Nov. 3 1972 — the Friday before I voted for the first time.

And yet — there are several people pictured here whom I would later work with, or at least come to know in the community after I arrived at The State in 1987 — Levona Page, Kent Krell, Margaret O’Shea and others. In fact, when I became governmental affairs editor in ‘87, one of them was still on the beat and working for me: that hepcat Lee Bandy (dig the hair!).

This ad boasts of the resources devoted to covering politics, and indeed, back then newspapers had reporters spilling out the windows, and newshole to burn. It was still that way when I started covering politics myself in ‘78. But then the long decline began, and finally newspaper finances went over the cliff this past decade.

One might also reflect on how different the SC political scene was in those days. First of all, there were no Republicans, except Strom Thurmond and Floyd Spence. So the Democratic primary was usually the election. Then there was the fact that the color barrier had just been broken in the Legislature, with a handful of black House members (but none in the Senate yet). This was two whole years before the legendary Pug Ravenel campaign, which idealistic then-young Democrats speak of today as though it occurred in the misty time of Camelot, or of King Elendil who wielded the sword Narsil before it was broken.

Anyway, I thought some of y’all would enjoy looking at it, too.

Posted in Elections, History, Mail call, Media, South Carolina, The State, Working | 6 Responses »

Nikki Haley, Vincent Sheheen offer clear choice on Confederate flag

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

The contrast between Vincent Sheheen and Nikki Haley will be sharp on a lot of issues, and we’ll get to them over the coming months.

But today, I want to highlight the difference between them on the Confederate flag flying on our State House grounds, as a window into broader differences. (And why that issue today? Because today is the 10th anniversary of the day it moved from the dome to the spot behind the soldier monument.)

Gina Smith in The State provided the following vignettes showing the difference. From Vincent Sheheen:

If elected governor in November, Sheheen said he is open to discussing the removal of the flag from the State House grounds. He was elected to the S.C. House a year after the compromise.

“We must develop an environment that creates jobs,” Sheheen said. “We cannot give up any edge that South Carolina has in attracting a large employer coming to South Carolina. After the last eight years, we must be proactive in creating a positive image of our state to the world.”

Sheheen offers no details, though, including locations where he would consider having the flag relocated.

“I have no predetermined proposal on the flag, but would like to work with legislative leaders, business leaders and community leaders to finally reach consensus. My job as governor will be to bring people together to reach consensus on how best to heal any divisions, including the flag,” he said.

It is unclear whether Sheheen supports the NAACP’s boycott.

And from Nikki Haley:

Haley wasn’t elected to the House until 2004. Haley believes a compromise was reached and the issue resolved.

“It was settled and it has been put away. And I don’t have any intentions of bringing it back up or making it an issue,” she said in a recent interview with the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Instead, Haley said her focus is on making state government more transparent and more business-friendly. “If the people aren’t focused on the flag, it’s hard to see why the governor and General Assembly should be,” said Rob Godfrey, Haley’s spokesman.

Haley implied in the Sons of Confederate Veterans interview that she would work with the NAACP and others who want the flag removed from the State House grounds to address the NAACP boycott. “I’m the perfect person to deal with the boycott. Because, as a minority female, I’m going to go and talk to them and I’m going to go and let them know that every state has their traditions. … But we need to talk about business. And we need to talk about having (businesses) come into our state …”

As you see, Vincent understands that the time must come when we stop portraying our state to the world as a haven for neo-Confederate extremists who insist upon continuing to embrace the worst moments of our history. He’s just too diplomatic to put it in quite those terms. If he had the chance, he’d get it down. By the way, his Uncle Bob, the former speaker, had the best idea of all about what to do about the flag: Replace it with a bronze plaque noting that it once flew here. That’s a solution that would enable us to move on. But the GOP leadership refused to seriously consider that or any other reasonable solution on the ONE DAY they allowed for debate before rushing to embrace this “compromise” that settled nothing.

Nikki, however, promises not to touch it, which is the standard South Carolina Republican response. And now that she’s promised it to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, that’s that. Which is a real shame, given that since she wasn’t in the Legislature at the time, no one could legitimately pretend that she is in any way bound by the “compromise” of 2000. She wasn’t a party to it.

She’s come a long way from being the inspiring emblem for tolerance that she truly was when she ran in 2004, when I took up the cudgels for her against the forces of ugly nativism. I’d like to see the national media folks who are SO EXCITED, in their superficial way, that an Indian-American woman might be elected in South Carolina take a moment to consider this. They also might want to watch her cozying up to the neo-Confederates in these video clips. Just something that should go into the calculation…

Note also the HUGE difference in their understanding of the impact of the flag on economic development. Vincent understands that if we want the rest of the world to take us seriously, the flag needs to come down. Nikki thinks the only obstacle to economic development here is the rather sad, ineffective boycott by the NAACP, which is weird on several levels.

Posted in 2010 Governor, Confederate flag, Elections, Legislature, Nikki Haley, South Carolina, Southern Discomfort, The State, Vincent Sheheen | 35 Responses »

The Benjamin inaugural breakfast

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

I’m backdating this because I’m catching up. I’m saying that so you’ll have an explanation when you go, “Huh? That wasn’t there on Thursday!”

Anyway, I thought I’d provide a glimpse of the breakfast at the Cap City Club. My wife and my daughter the dancer went along, as the event was a benefit for Columbia City Ballet. William Starrett and I both wore seersucker, but I swear we didn’t coordinate it in advance. We sat across from George Zara and John Kessler from Providence Hospital and Mrs. Kessler.

Below you will see the Fourth Estate posing with the … what Estate would the new mayor be (I’m not sure it fits into that model)? In any case, Adam Beam of The State and Steve Benjamin are having their picture taken by the Fifth Estate, a phrase which as you know I continue to belabor in the hope that it will catch on.

Posted in 2010 Columbia mayoral, Contact report, Midlands, The State | No Responses »

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